Gates May Cut At Least One Army Brigade from Europe

The U.S.’s huge troop footprint in Europe is a Cold War relic in search of a rationale. Working with NATO militaries? Sure, but you don’t need tens of thousands of troops for that, as Colombia can attest. Supplying the war in Afghanistan? Germany’s Ramstein Air Base is a major air-cargo transit point, sure, but even this war will end someday. And there’s no threat of Russian tanks pushing westward.

But don’t expect the Pentagon to make any dramatic changes to the U.S.’s 60-year old posture in Europe. Defense Secretary Robert Gates thinks it’s too large and too brass-heavy, but Danger Room is hearing that only one Army brigade might actually get shipped back home.

In his Thursday press conference, Gates called out U.S. European Command for hosting way too many cushy billets for senior officers, part of his long-telegraphed effort to get rid of useless jobs for generals and admirals. The services’ top contributing officers in Europe will now be three-stars instead of four-stars, with their large support staffs reduced accordingly. But Gates only hinted about trimming what he called “clear… excess force structure” on a continent at peace.

According to what we’ve been able to learn since, here’s what’s up for review: at least one Army brigade, at most 3500 soldiers. Seem like small beer? The Army has 42,000 soldiers stationed in Germany and Italy (currently scheduled to drop to 32,000 by 2014), including four brigade combat teams. Danger Room was waved off of expecting “major” troop reductions in the ballpark of tens of thousands. That will leave the military way invested in Europe, which doesn’t face any likely threat that U.S. ground forces would be required to deter or repel.

After killing the Marines’ landing craft and restructuring the Marine version of the F-35 jet, Gates evidently has little appetite for the kinds of deep cuts that the Bush administration made to U.S. force structure in Europe. His predecessor, Donald Rumsfeld, learned that pulling even token numbers of troops out of Europe invites panic in Washington and Brussels about how the U.S. isn’t committed to NATO anymore.

So while one brigade may be re-stationed in the U.S., Gates’ review is mostly focused on trimming the size of command and headquarters staffs, something Tom Ricks cheers on his blog. Unit composition is also being studied, so it’s possible that some units will transition back home while those with different functions or from different services may deploy to Europe. As the review process is just getting started, it doesn’t appear as if Gates has identified specific units for the shift.

And all this raises additional questions as to what the enduring troop contribution in Europe will do. The Air Force and the Navy love their German airbases and Italian ports for accessing the volatile Mideast and Central Asia. But the Army component in Europe has more to do with geopolitics: showing the NATO allies that the U.S. is still a transatlantic power, willing to sustain a huge force in its European partner countries as an ante. It helps that Euro-bases are an economic boon to their hosts, which is one of the reasons why Europeans catch the vapors when the U.S. military so much as hints about moving troops out for good.

Don’t expect that to happen this time around. Gates hopes to sell the National Security Council, the State Department and the U.S. Mission to NATO on the force restructuring before taking it to the NATO council. The idea is to address European concerns about the plan before taking any steps to pull troops off the continent, so as to avoid a reprise of the public-diplomacy blunder that greeted the U.S.’s 2009 revisions to European missile defense.

The Pentagon has four years to get it right. No actual changes in Euro force structure will happen before 2015, the same timetable Gates set for cutting the Army and Marine Corps by up to 47,000. Looks like the next Army chief of staff, Gen. Martin Dempsey, will be building a much different peacetime Army than many anticipated, even before the Afghanistan war ends.